how i became brannon, part II (continued)

 

 

With my grandmother.

 

Elementary school was fine.  I did well and made friends and was a good, polite student.  I remember sticking my face in a gigantic picture book of the United States map when I was in 2nd grade.  With the huge cardboard pages covering my head from all sides, I talked into the crack of the book as if no one could hear me.  I hope no one actually did because there’s no telling what kind of things I might have said aloud.  When I was in 3rd grade, I dressed up as the main character from the book Freckle Juice during one of our dress-up days.  I woke up extra early so my mom could put hundreds of freckles on my face and arms and legs with a magic marker.

I began my writing, acting, and singing career in 4th grade when I helped write a play for our class.  Each year, the 4th grade students at our elementary school put on a play with the help from our music teacher.  That year, the program was called Opera Kicks Back! but I forget what the play was called.  I helped write it and also starred and sang in it.  It was a lot of fun and at the after party, all the girls wanted to dance with me.  I was kind of a big deal.  If only I knew I was gonna peak in 4th grade, I might have made those dances with the girls last a little bit longer.

The year before middle school was the beginning of my major psychological traumas.  One of my classmates called me fat and that sparked an awareness of my body I had not possessed before.  It resulted in the continuous struggle with my weight that I continue to endure even today.  I remember sitting on the living room floor with a crayon in one hand and a Slim-Fast in the other.  I remember the red shade of embarrassment when my mom took me school shopping for more husky jeans and how I had to go up a new size every year, not just because I was growing up but also growing out.  And I remember that I just couldn’t stop myself from eating.

I remember my mother making these delicious meals and letting me have seconds and thirds and sometimes even fourths.  That was how she showed her love.  That was how I found my comfort.  But after a while, there was something terrible penetrating that comfort.  That comfort had consequences.  I was fat now and people were noticing and some were even pointing it out.  This mix of feeling good about food but feeling bad about my belly caused an anxiety that made my insides itch.

I was distrustful of people at an early age.  I’ve tried to figure out why that is.  I’m taking a giant leap here but I wonder if it has anything to do with my sister and how she treated me when she was younger.  For the longest time, I was unaware of her feelings for me.  I knew I got on her nerves sometimes because she never hesitated to tell me.  I rationalized it as the typical sibling tension.  But what if it was more?  What if I realized her surface niceties hid a deep resentment that oftentimes poured over in jokes at my expense or outright ignoring me all together?  If my own sister could dislike me so much for no other reason other than just existing, then anyone not bound by blood could treat me the same way.

I remember being on the playground in 2nd or 3rd grade and telling a good friend that I thought his friendship was fraudulent.  I can’t even remember why I felt that way but it wasn’t until several years later did he prove my suspicions to be correct.  Around that same time, I remember swinging on a swing all by myself, my head down to the ground, while the other kids gathered around the monkey bars.  I remember feeling very alone, even back then, even at that age.  I don’t know why.

We all went into middle school as equals.  We had no clique or caste system to navigate, no ranks to rise through.  We only had each other.  But as we interacted with the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, who seemed so mature and cool to us 5th graders, we branched out and were influenced by them.  It was the time when kids began to grow out of cartoons and action figures and started figuring out how kissing worked and saw the opposite sex as more than a sandbox buddy.

But I seemed to have skipped over all that evolution.  I still liked cartoons like Doug and Nickelodeon’s Saturday night lineup, dubbed SNICK, with gems like All That and Are You Afraid of the Dark, which helped to bolster my love of the macabre.  I still enjoyed drawing and interacting with my toys more than interacting with my peers.  And I still liked eating.

I had gained more weight and felt bad about my body.  It didn’t help that puberty hit me early and hard.  Not only did my waistline expand but my face exploded with acne.  And I’m not talking about a cluster of surface pimples that lasted a month.  My cheeks were ravaged by deep, painful pimples.  My face was an oil slick.  And I sprouted body hair before any of my male classmates so changing into my gym clothes during PE was a nightmare.  I didn’t want anyone else to see my hairy armpits or fat stretch-marked stomach.

In fact, the first day I had to take my shirt off in front of everyone in the locker room, I got so terrified of ridicule that I went into the showers, an unused area of the locker room where the lights weren’t even turned on.  One of my classmates, instead of minding his own business, told the coach, an angry man with a bald head, and just as I gathered up my school clot

hing, he barged in and screamed for me to get out.  "This isn’t a designated changing out area!" he shouted.  I squeaked out a meek apology and went back to my locker and put my clothes in as everyone stared at me, the exact thing I did not want to happen to me in the first place.

Because I was fat, I tried to cover up my stomach with layers of clothes, which only made me hot and sweaty.  I also suffered from sebhorroeic dermatitis on my scalp, which caused a lot of itching and red irritation and I usually walked around with white flakes on my shoulders.  To top it off, my teeth were irregular and I felt disgusting.  I know people thought I was a fat, flaky, sweaty mess.  And I was.

So I ate to deal.  I did not turn to friends or family but to fried food.  I unknowingly secluded myself, stayed in my bedroom with a box of donuts and reinforced the feel good feelings of sweets and carbohydrates and self-medication.  Food was the best relationship I ever had.

 

 

Whoops. We don’t take care of our pictures in my family.

 

Sometimes trauma can happen when nothing happens.  I was not bullied or pushed to the ground.  I wasn’t called names.  I wasn’t called at all.  I was a reluctant loner.  I had friends but I never felt like they understood me and I certainly didn’t understand them.  I saw my classmates go to parties and make out and fall in love and drive out of town to go to the mall and concerts and do all the things normal teenagers do.  I saw them living.  And I could not be a part of that, mostly because I exiled myself and stayed at home where it was safe, where there was food, where I didn’t have to worry about hiding my acne or covering up my fat.  I looked forward to Friday’s not because there were parties with friends to attend but because I could sit down and watch TGIF on the ABC channel.  I remember eating a bag of Doritos and draining glass after glass of Diet Coke as I watched Sabrina, the Teenage Witch or Family Matters.  I only felt comfortable at home and the discomfort of going out, of being in the lives of others, wasn’t worth the possible rewards.  And besides, I simply didn’t understand the territories my friends were traversing into.  Their hormones surged until they were slick with sweat in the backseat of their cars.  That was the one part of puberty that never kicked in for me.

I thought girls were pretty.  I had infinitesimal crushes on my classmates but subconsciously I could not let it get further than that because I was not worth their time.  I was the one my friends went to when they had a problem with the opposite sex.  They told me their horror stories of being dumped or falling in love with someone and not being recognized.  I vicariously experienced the pain of their loss, of their desperate hope to be noticed in a crowd of beautiful people.  And I did not want to experience that kind of hurt first hand.  I already had enough pain on my plate with my face and body explosion so I didn’t need the psychological scars of heartbreak on top of my physical scars from stretched skin.

And so I shut down that part of me.  I wanted to love.  I wanted to be loved.  But I didn’t deserve it.  No one would think a guy like me was attractive.  Especially when everyone around me got braces and made it through their acne phases with no scars.  I couldn’t understand how some of my peers never even had a pimple and I was given the worst of it.  It made me bitter and nothing at the drugstore or department store made my skin better.

I often see-sawed between wanting a girlfriend and just wanting a best friend.  I didn’t have anyone I could tell my secrets to.  I didn’t have anyone to cuddle with or watch those horror movies with.  I often feel separated from the rest of my peers.  I often tried too hard to belong, to feel included.  I tried to dress a certain way and get good grades and seem smart to be a part of the popular crowd.  The results were only slightly successful.  Everyone knew my name but no one knew who I was.

The only one I considered a good friend at the time was the most popular guy in my grade.  He was the one I confronted on the playground all those years ago, the one I accused of being my friend for illegitimate reasons.  It turns out I was his hidden friend, the one he could turn to and tell anything to without risk of judgment.  He couldn’t be as open with his popular friends.  With them, he had to maintain an image.  With me, he did not.

And he told me everything, all his secrets.  I was the first person he came out to.  It didn’t bother me and I supported him.  But from then on, all he wanted to do was discuss his homosexuality with me and the different relationships he hand gotten himself tangled in with other closeted guys from other schools.  I wanted to be there for him as a friend but after a while, I realized he wasn’t asking me about my love life.  Although I know he didn’t do it on purpose, he used me to vent, to cry and to gush about guys.

I tried to find God, prayed to Jesus and went to church.  My parents believed in God but they were not religious.  I relied on my Christian friends to help navigate the murky waters of religion.  Church didn’t go over too well with me.  I didn’t like the screaming of the pastors (going back to the fear of screaming my parents instilled in me).  And the ones who didn’t scream were boring as dirt.  I didn’t like how Christianity encouraged you to p

ut yourself down, how original sin makes everyone scum.  Now that I think about it, it’s kind of funny how I was put off by that approach because that’s how I always treated myself anyway, without God’s guiding hand.

It wasn’t all about avoiding church.  I tried to research God on my own.  I tried to believe.  And for a long time, I did.  In my humble opinion, I was a good Christian.  Although it didn’t make me feel better besides thinking I was doing the right thing, and although it didn’t alleviate the loneliness, I carried on with Christianity.  And cake, of course.